The great waves of her hair, her only garment, covered one of her sides.
This hair was resplendently opaque, soft as fur, longer than a bird’s wing, supple, uncountable, full of life and warmth. It covered half her back, flowed under her naked belly, glittered under her knees in thick, curling clusters. The young woman was enwrapped in this precious fleece. It glinted with a russet sheen, almost metallic, and had procured her the name of Chrysis, given her by the courtesans of Alexandria.
It was not the sleek hair of the court-woman from Syria, or the dyed hair of the Asiatics, or the black and brown hair of the daughters of Egypt. It was the hair of an Aryan race, the Galilæans across the sands.
Chrysis. She loved the name. The young men who came to see her called her Chryse like Aphrodite, in the verses they laid at her door, with rose-garlands, in the morning. She did not believe in Aphrodite, but she liked to be compared to the goddess, and she went to the temple sometimes, in order to give her, as to a friend, boxes of perfumes and blue veils.
She was born upon the borders of Lake Gennesaret, in a country of sun and shade, overgrown by laurel roses. Her mother used to go out in the evening upon the Jerusalem road, and wait for the travelers and merchants. She gave herself to them in the grass, in the midst of the silence of the fields. This woman was greatly loved in Galilee. The priests did not turn aside from her door, for she was charitable and pious. She always paid for the sacrificial lambs, and the blessing of the Eternal abode upon her house. Now when she became with child, her pregnancy being a scandal (for she had no husband), a man celebrated for his gift of prophecy told her that she would give birth to a maiden who should one day carry “the riches and faith of a people” around her neck. She did not well understand how that might be, but she named the child Sarah, that is to say princess in Hebrew. And that closed the mouth of slander.
Chrysis had always remained in ignorance of this incident, the seer having told her mother how dangerous it is to reveal to people the prophecies of which they are the object. She knew nothing of her future. That is why she often thought about it. She remembered her childhood but little, and did not like to speak about it. The only vivid sensation she had retained was the fear and disgust caused her by the anxious surveillance of her mother, who, on the approach of her time for going forth upon the road, shut her up alone in her chamber for interminable hours. She also remembered the round window through which she saw the waters of the lake, the blue-tinted fields, the transparent sky, the blithe air of Galilee. The house was covered with tamarisks and rose-coloured flax. Thorny caper-bushes reared their green heads in wild confusion, over-topping the fine mist of the grasses. The little girls bathed in a limpid brook, where they found red shells under the tufts of flowering laurels; and there were flowers upon the water and flowers over all the mead and great lilies upon the mountains.
She was twelve years old when she escaped from home to follow a troop of young horsemen who were on their way to Tyre to sell ivory. She fell in with them before a cistern. They were adorning their long-tailed horses with multi-coloured tufts. She well remembered how she was carried off, pale with joy upon their horses, and how they stopped a second time during the night, a night so clear that the stars were invisible.
Neither had she forgotten how they entered Tyre: she in front, seated upon the panniers of a pack-horse, holding on to its mane with her fists, and proudly dangling her naked calves, to show the women of the town that she had pure blood coursing in her well-shaped legs. They left for Egypt that same evening. She followed the ivory-sellers as far as the market of Alexandria.
Greek harlots from the isles told her the legend of Iphis.